Saturday, February 2, 2013

Post coitum

An excerpt from the novel, due March 12 from Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin's Press), in which the famous wine critic is challenged:

Claire rose on one elbow, exhaled,
and said with a smile, “Well, BTDT,” a jocularity intended to make her husband
feel better about his, well, supine performance. True, he had been there, but
he hadn’t done that. No matter; the day beckoned. “Anything special in the
line-up?”

“Yes, you’re going to be challenged
today, CJ. By this valley’s own. Nine cabernets in the up bunch,” which meant
costing at least one hundred and thirty dollars a bottle.

“Why not ten cabernets?” It was the
usual arrangement of American grands crus.

“Well, the tenth one’s a mystery.
No label, nothing. I want to include it because it seems special and has been
around for a bit. Arrived in a lovely cedar box, wrapped in a Pashmina shawl.”

Those things meant nothing.
Vintners spend small fortunes encapsulating mediocre wine in a way that makes
it seem of a higher order, the same logic used for building their expensive
houses and wineries. Packaging, like labels, was deception. One of his duties
as a premier wine critic – the
premier wine critic, he liked to think - was to out deception in Craven-Jones on Wine, with its
pass-along readership of, he often insisted, more than a million. “How did it
get here?”

“By hand, that’s all we know.”

Why hadn’t the dog alerted them?
Clyde Craven-Jones didn’t allow wine to be left on his doorstep; only the most
audacious – or stupid – would attempt it. But he was curious, and any worthy
critic welcomes the random chance to test his mettle. Besides, Claire had gone
to the trouble of including it. “Let’s begin.”

Solemnly launching himself into a
roll, the massive, custom-made bed protesting feebly, his wife nimbly getting
out of the way. She went into the bathroom and he heard water filling a tub
designed for corpulence beyond the American standard, with special handles for
easing himself in and out. He thought he caught a trace of something floral –
tansy? camellia? His policy was no manufactured fragrances of any sort in the
house, perfume being the worst, an assault fraught with plant renderings and
mysterious chemical compounds that gave him an immediate migraine and affected
his ability to taste. He demanded plain soap for his morning immersion, baking
soda for his toothbrush, an electric razor for the graying scrim of beard
accenting copious, signature jowls.

In team velour sweats – a gift from a wine distributor,
unsolicited but comfy – and rope-soled espadrilles, Clyde Craven-Jones moves
with deliberation from his boudoir to a hallway lined with cheaply-framed
photographs of himself with every personage in the wine world who matters,
among them two of his late countrymen, noble, modest scholars of the grape and
fine practitioners of the English language, both dead now.

He’s the last of the ranking Brits and long
ago succumbed to the allure of the New World,
with its lack of ceremony, its un-blinkered heat that even in the straw-hued
mirage of summer he finds preferable to the damp determinism of his native
land.

And, of course, the California wines
themselves: heavily extracted, endowed with strangely-scented variants that his
English colleagues found perverse but he has come to admire for their richness
and power. He’s responsible for much of that intensity, favoring in his reviews
those cabernets and pinot noirs with some flesh on their bones, much to the
disgust of the French who have been made to compete with California and what’s
sometimes called “the Craven-Jones style,” lest they languish on shelves
absorbing light and drying out like old men abandoned in a sauna.

He pushes open the door. The organ
that matters most to him – that distinctive protuberance bigger than other
men’s, more sensitive, gifted, in fact, beyond the bounds of ordinary human
perceptiveness – his nose, has guts of its own. Also the ability to raise its
lucky owner to the top of his profession and into the company of some of the
wealthiest, most talented, sometimes most reprehensible people on earth, an
appendage so remarkable in it has appeared in the pages of a leading
newsweekly: slightly hooked, increasingly veiny, near-infallible.

The former dining room is heavily
draped, temperature controlled, with overhead tract lighting, racks of Riedel
glasses in every imaginable contortion for concentrating aromas, open cartons
of wine, unlined writing pads, 3B drawing pencils - no pens! - a sterling
spitting bucket with splash guard, and, on the white tablecloth, ten bottles
neatly wrapped in brown paper by his obliging wife and numbered by her current
assistant, the perpetually distracted James. One of a procession of helpers in love
with wine, soon disabused of the notion that caddying for the critic is a
spiritual pastime, he has removed the foils and poured an equal amount of wine
from each bottle into a stemmed glass elegantly constricted at the rim.

CJ pauses, slightly elevating his
nostrils, priming them with a barely perceptible twitch, angling in the
direction of the sideboard. He has detected an alien odor among the familiar
ones. Ah, the felt pen, left behind with the top off, the acrid smell emanating
from evaporating ink. “Ja-hames!”

The door swings open and in steps
the ingratiating amanuensis. In Bordeaux he
would be wearing, at the very least, a buttoned-up shirt, but in California it’s
open-necked rugby-style, with jeans: the uniform. Fuzz on the chin, smiling -
everyone in California
smiles - the young man’s big, brown eyes denoting apprehension. “What’s up,
CJ?”

“The Magic Marker’s up, James.”

“Shit. Sorry about that.”

James scoops it up, smacks the cap
in place and goes back through the revolving door. A handsome lad, maybe a tad
too handsome, chastened but overdue for remaindering; has Claire found
something of value in James beyond his ability to heft wine cartons, open
bottles, and run the dishwasher? (No detergent!) But now Craven-Jones is distracted
by the right smells: cabernet sauvignon’s infinity of masked components, its
glorious potential enhanced by caresses of cabernet franc, petite verdot,
merlot, even malbec, as well as oak and the panoply of botanical associations
that push all else from his mind and bring to his palate an anticipatory
wetness.

Almost daintily he takes his chair
and eyes the delectable prey. The tease before the main event, the vinous
equivalent of a naked woman walking around a boxing ring holding aloft a
placard with a number on it. Where are the muscles and firm flesh, where the
flab? Who will have the up-front power and fruit, who the longest finish in
this match-up of potential champions? Sports references are absolutely
necessary for communication in this, his chosen country, but CJ knows little of
sport beyond the terrible memories of rugby in the damp desolation of his Midlands preparatory school. Metaphorically, he favors
sumo wrestling: enormous combatants pushing at each other, stately, powerful.

At his elbow sits a cut-glass bowl
full of air-popped corn, sans butter
and salt, the perfect palate cleanser: weightless mopper-up of all vestiges of
sampled wine. The popcorn’s smell reminds CJ of his gnawing hunger, to be put
off until lunch, which today will commence with wafer-thin sole fillets over
which scalding French butter has been poured, no other cooking required,
complemented by a slightly chilled Puligny-Montrachet.

He’s getting ahead of himself;
dining follows due labor, the reigning Craven-Jones maxim. Meanwhile no flaw
shall pass this nose, these lips, this palate, without detection, no
short-coming shall go unannounced in what Claire calls his doomsday book, Craven-Jones on Wine, printed on actual
paper, with a paid circulation of one hundred and twenty thousand and a
pass-along influence of, yes, a million. Craven-Jones
on Wine often breaks, as well as makes, reputations, vintages, business
deals, marriages, even lives. Such is his power and, of course, his burden.

Ready now, nasal chambers cleared
with a mild saline solution, his copiousness fondly settled into the
custom-made, re-enforced rolling chair set high enough to prevent his having to
bend his knees, he passes flared nostrils over the glasses first, guessing the
species of oak from which the barrels were made that until recently held these
gems. Limoge? Alliere. My God, Arkansas!
He will soon know exactly who made the wines and how long the fruit hung on the
vines, the blend, the barrel regimen, the fining agent, and how well they sell
on the futures market depends upon his evaluation.

He picks up a glass by the stem and
angles it, examining the color against the white table cloth. Deeply mauve,
cabernet’s own depthless version of purple, concentrated to the rim. Ah, these New World hues. His fellow Brits reeled in their
presence, but CJ came to love them as a deliverer from the anonymous life of
bottle drudge in the chilly cellars of Lily & Sons, Ltd., City of London, scribbling reviews
for the firm’s news-sheet, before he branched out under a pseudonym.

Compressing now one nostril with a
forefinger and passing the glass under the other, he inhales deeply. The
olfactory equivalent of matins in a village chapel go off in a brain inculcated
with associations: black cherries, currents, brambles, lanolin, tobacco, cedar,
chocolate. But also flaws: blatant woodiness – it’s well known that Clyde
Craven-Jones disapproves of harsh tannins – and a good but hardly spectacular
finish.

He ejects a purple stream into the
bowl, scribbles “gobs of fruit. . . too-rapid falling off on the middle palate.
. . predictable,” and moves on to the next bottle.